Will the Voting Rights Act Become a Victim of its Own Success? …..By Hugh Hamilton

When the Supreme Court hears arguments this Wednesday (April 29) in a case challenging one of the key components of the federal Voting Rights Act, it will be doing so amid a political landscape that is far less openly hostile to Blacks than when the law was first enacted 44 years ago. But the court should not infer from this that the landmark legislation is no longer needed. On the contrary, many of the political gains that our so-called “racial, ethnic and language minorities” now enjoy are directly attributable to the vigorous application of the law. The success of the law therefore argues in favor of its retention, rather than any retreat from its enforcement.

At issue is the “pre-clearance” provision of the Act, which requires that before making any changes to current electoral procedures, states and other jurisdictions with a history of practices that restrict minority voting rights must first obtain permission from the Justice Department or federal court. In adopting the requirement – commonly known as Section 5 – Congress sought to remedy a history of discriminatory electoral practices targeting Blacks in direct violation of the 15^th Amendment. (Such practices included an assortment of restrictive voting requirements, literacy tests, poll taxes, intimidation and often, outright violence). As President Lyndon Johnson remarked in 1965 upon signing the bill into law:

“This act flows from a clear and simple wrong. Its only purpose is to right that wrong. Millions of Americans are denied the right to vote because of their color. This law will ensure them the right to vote. The wrong is one which no American, in his heart, can justify. The right is one which no American, true to our principles, can deny.”

The pre-clearance requirement applies to nine states – Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia – and to various counties and towns in seven others. In New York, three of the five boroughs are covered by the provision. Since its initial enactment, the law has been extended four times – most recently in 2006 for a 25-year period.

The legal architect of this latest challenge to the law is Gregory S. Coleman, a former Texas solicitor general who brought the suit on behalf of the Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 – a tiny utilities district in Austin that is covered by the law. As The Washington Post reports, Coleman is a politically active lawyer who once clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas and testified before Congress in opposition to extending the Voting Rights Act in 2006. He recruited the utilities district for a test case after Congress enacted its latest extension.

Not surprisingly, the election last fall of Barack Obama to the presidency features prominently in Coleman’s brief to the court:

“The America that has elected Barack Obama as its first African American president is far different than when Section 5 was first enacted in 1965,” he wrote. “There is no warrant for continuing to presume that jurisdictions first identified four decades ago as needing extraordinary federal oversight through Section 5 remain uniformly incapable or unwilling to fulfill their obligations to faithfully protect the voting rights of all citizens in those parts of the country.”

I put that argument last January to Laughlin McDonald, director of the Voting Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, and he was having none of it. Here’s part of his response from the Wednesday, January 14, 2009 edition of Talkback:

“The Supreme Court and an appellate court can indeed take judicial notice of recent elections, but there are a lot of cases out there which say that the mere election of a minority to office is not enough to defeat a Section 5 claim. The courts have said that the relevant standard under the Voting Rights Act is whether a system usually diminishes the ability of minorities to elect candidates of their choice. So I don’t think the mere fact that Barack Obama was elected would be dispositive. In addition, you only have to look at the actual results to see that six of the states that are covered in whole or in part by Section 5 did not go for Obama – they went for McCain. In those jurisdictions we do not see the abnegation of history, racial attitudes and the persistent pattern of racial block voting; it still exists.”

According to McDonald’s analysis, the white vote for Obama in several of the covered states actually declined in 2008 compared to that for the white Democratic candidate John Kerry four years earlier. For example, Kerry got 19 percent of the white vote in Alabama in 2004, while Obama got just 10 percent in 2008. In Louisiana, Kerry got 24 percent of the white vote in 2004, while Obama got only 14 percent in 2008. In Mississippi, Kerry got 14 percent of the white vote, and Obama 11 percent.

And regarding the idea that this latest reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act was based on decades-old evidence, McDonald was equally dismissive, noting that Congress extended Section 5 after holding more than 20 public hearings and examining a record that exceeded 15,000 pages. Legislators noted the hundreds of Section 5 objections that had occurred since the last extension in 1982, as well as the hundreds of lawsuits that successfully challenged racially discriminatory voting practices during the same period. The 2006 extension of the Act was passed by an overwhelming majority of the House (390-33) and by a unanimous vote of the Senate. (The ACLU, which is among several civil rights organizations that have intervened in the case, discusses the legislative record at considerable length in its brief to the court).

While it is true that African American voters — as well as other racial, ethnic and language minorities – are no longer hamstrung by some of the more overt restrictions and exclusionary electoral machinations of the past, that does not mean that the lessons of the past are no longer instructive in our present circumstances. In his book, Stealing Democracy: The New Politics of Voter Suppression, George Washington University law professor Spencer Overton likens our vast and complex electoral system to a “matrix” that requires continuous attention “so that it more fairly empowers all voters rather than simply privileging the insiders who know how to manipulate it.” As he explains:

“Contrary to conventional perception, American democracy is not an organic, grassroots phenomenon that mirrors society’s preferences. In reality, the will of the people is channeled by a predetermined matrix of thousands of election regulations and practices that most people accept as natural: the location of election-district boundaries, voter-registration deadlines, and the number of voting machines at a busy polling place. This structure of election rules, practices and decisions filters out certain citizens from voting and organizes the electorate. There is no ‘right’ to vote outside of the terms, conditions, hurdles and boundaries set by the matrix.”

That’s why we need a robust Voting Rights Act as much now as we ever did: to safeguard the rights and secure the interests of those who history has shown to be the likeliest targets for marginalization by the matrix.

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For Obama, a Missed Opportunity for a Teachable Moment …..by Hugh Hamilton

Since taking office, Barack Obama has restored the art of rhetorical fluency to the presidential podium. His command of detail in the finer points of public policy has been refreshing, to say the least. He may not always get it right, but it’s clear that this is a president who does his homework. So it was all the more surprising that when called upon this week by ABC news reporter Ann Compton to comment on the role of race in his presidency thus far, President Obama fumbled the opportunity for what could have been a “teachable moment.”

Perhaps he was caught flat-footed by the question – after all, it is not often that “race” makes it to the top-ten list of topics selected for public discussion in polite society. But coming so soon after his own attorney general chided the American public for their reluctance to confront the issue, it was especially disappointing that the president did not seize the moment for a more expansive discourse on the intersection of race and public policy. We know that he is capable of rising to the occasion – as evidenced by his landmark speech on race delivered in Philadelphia one year ago this month. Maybe he thought that in light of the prevailing economic recession, this was not the right time to revisit the issue. But I would argue that this is precisely the moment to do so, as it offers a unique and invaluable opportunity to examine how our tormented legacy of race maintains a stranglehold on the lives of millions of contemporary Americans.

Ignoring the problem will not make it go away. So in the spirit of public service, I am offering herewith a primer on what the president might have said had he chosen to address Compton’s question with the expansiveness it deserved. First, here’s Compton’s actual question:

Compton:“Sir … Could I ask you about race?”

Obama:“You may.”

Compton:“Yours is a rather historic presidency and I’m just wondering whether in any of the policy debates that you’ve had within the White House, the issue of race has come up, or whether it has in the way you feel you’ve been perceived by other leaders or by the American people. Or have thelast 64 days been a relatively color-blind time?”

Now here’s the president’s actual response:

Obama:“I think that the last 64 days has been dominated by me trying to figure out how we’re going to fix the economy, and that’s [as it] affects black, brown and white. And you know, obviously, at Inauguration I think there was justifiable pride on the part of the country that we had taken a step to move us beyond some of the searing legacies of racial discrimination in this country. But that lasted about a day. And you know, right now the American people are judging me exactly the way I should be judged and that is: are we taking the steps to improve liquidity in the financial markets, create jobs, get businesses to reopen, keep American safe? And that’s what I’ve been spending time thinking about.”

Not bad.

But here’s some of what I think the president also might have said, thereby elevating the public consciousness on this critical question:

Obama: “Let me be clear: as president of the United States, I am fully committed to securing and advancing the best interests of every single American, regardless of race, color or creed. But as president I must also acknowledge the facts as they are and confront them accordingly. And the fact is that this recession — painful as it is for all of us — has exacted a heavier toll on some than on others. And for those who historically have been marginalized and discriminated against on the basis of race, that toll has been heaviest of all.

It’s not just me saying this; as Market Watch reported just recently: The recession began before it began for some workers. With about 3.6 million jobs lost since the recession officially began just over a year ago, the reeling job market is not hitting all demographic groups equally. Among Blacks, the seasonably adjusted unemployment rate reached 12.6 percent in January, compared with the national rate of 7.6 percent. In fact, Black unemployment has been well above our current national rate since 2001.

And Blacks are not alone in this regard; among Hispanics, their unemployment rate of nearly 10 percent is also well above the national level.

In times of severe economic hardship such as we are all experiencing today, some are able to cushion the blow by tapping into whatever reserves they might have accumulated in times of relative prosperity. But here again, Blacks are uniquely disadvantaged. The most recent research on wealth disparity in this country reveals that on average, people of color possess less than ten cents for every dollar of white wealth; only 14 percent of people of color have retirement accounts, compared to 43 percent of whites; and nearly 30 percent of Blacks have zero or negative worth, compared to 15 percent of whites.

Indeed, the African American community has been trapped in a recession since the turn of the century. Last September, the Economic Policy Institute sounded the alarm in a report titled, Reversal of Fortune, wherein the authors noted that since 2000, Blacks have been steadily losing what modest economic gains they acquired during the preceding decade. On all major economic indicators – income, wages, employment and poverty – African Americans were worse off in 2007 than they were seven years earlier.

The sub-prime mortgage crisis has made things even worse. For much of the past century African Americans were excluded as a matter of public policy from the opportunity to build wealth through government-subsidized home ownership. Low-interest mortgages guaranteed by the Veterans Administration and the Federal Housing Authority enabled an entire generation of Americans to become middle-class homeowners – except if you were Black. As explained in the award-winning book, The Color of Wealth: “Overall, less than 1 percent of all mortgages went to African Americans between 1930 and 1960. Bankers received the FHA Underwriting Manual which included a ban on lending in integrated neighborhoods. Millions of African Americans who moved north after the war encountered opposition from white developers, lenders, realtors, local officials and white mobs determined to keep them out of white areas. Restrictive covenants were attached to deeds to require white owners to sell only to white buyers.”

Of course things have changed since then – both as a matter of law and public policy. But not before an entire generation of hard-working, patriotic, tax-paying African Americans was shut out from the opportunity to benefit from one of our country’s most significant periods of prosperity and growth. By every economic measure, those who on the basis of race were denied the chance to buy a home with government help, and to give their children a leg up in life by passing on that equity to the next generation, are lagging behind their counterparts to this day.

Many of these very families were doubly victimized by the predatory lending practices that were a prominent feature of the recent sub-prime mortgage crisis. According to available data, people of color were more than three times more likely to be steered into sub-prime loans than whites. Now that the bubble has burst, one recent report estimates that the sub-prime crisis will constitute the greatest loss of wealth for people of color in modern American history.

As president, I carry with me the burden of that history and its enduring consequences. But I also carry with me the hope that we can construct in this country a framework for reparative justice that will enable us to begin the process of healing our legacy of past discrimination. I do not yet know what form that framework will take. But I do know that it cannot be color-blind any more than it can be gender-neutral. And I look forward to convening a national conversation with the American people on how best we can undertake this challenge in the period ahead.”

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Decades of Disparity, Soaring Costs, Take Toll In War On Drugs… by Hugh Hamilton

If Blacks and whites in America use illegal drugs at roughly comparable rates, then why are Blacks arrested at rates several times higher than whites for the same drug-related offenses?

I put the question recently to Jamie Fellner, senior counsel at the U.S. Program of Human Rights Watch. Fellner is also author of a new report titled, Decades of Disparity: Drug Arrests and Race in the United States. Here’s what she said:

“From its very beginning, the U.S. war on drugs has been colored by race; race is the lens through which drug problems are defined and through which the responses are chosen. I do not believe that having mandatory sentences would have been implemented or maintained to this day if it were whites being sent to prison at the rates that Blacks are being sent to prison. There would have been huge pressure for change. But since it’s Blacks who are disproportionately bearing the burden of law enforcement and mandatory minimum sentences, there’s been less political pressure.”

Using data obtained from the FBI, Fellner’s research revealed that for nearly three decades (1980 to 2007 – the last year for which complete data were available), adult African Americans were arrested on drug charges at rates five times as high as those for whites. An analysis of state-by-state data showed that the disparity was even greater in some jurisdictions: in Minnesota, for example, Blacks were arrested at rates 11 times higher than whites for drug offenses in 2006. As Fellner explained, “Jim Crow may be dead, but the drug war has never been color-blind. Although whites and Blacks use and sell drugs at comparable rates, the heavy hand of the law is more likely to fall on Black shoulders.”

Noting that these racial disparities reflect a history of complex political, criminal-justice and socio-economic dynamics, Fellner argued that the disproportionate burden imposed on Black families and neighborhoods has exacted a social, economic and political toll on them that is “as incalculable as it is unjust.” For as long as urban communities of color remain the central focus of drug enforcement efforts, while suburban whites in gated communities get a free pass, for so long will these unwarranted disparities persist.

But Fellner also cautioned that while reducing the disparities is imperative, it should not be accomplished simply by increasing the rate of white drug arrests. Instead, she calls for a “rethinking of the drug-war paradigm,” with more emphasis on prevention and substance abuse treatment, and less on drug enforcement. She favors the use of community-based sanctions for drug offenses and the elimination of mandatory minimum sentences for them.

Alternatives to Incarceration

Legal scholars, substance-abuse experts and social-justice advocates have long inveighed against mandatory minimum sentences for first-time and low-level drug offenders. Their arguments may be as varied as the disciplines they represent, but they come to rest ultimately at the same conclusion: that mandatory sentences are ineffective and inappropriate as a matter of public policy. Some, like clinical psychologist Dr. Bruce Levine, even point to what they see as a double standard in the way we treat consumers of prescription versus street drugs. According to Levine:

“When we recognize that psychotropic prescription drugs are chemically similarto illegal psychotropic drugs, and that all these substances are used for similar purposes, we see two injustices. First, we see the classification of millions of Americans as criminals for using certain drugs, while millions of others, using essentially similar drugs for similar purposes, are seen as patients. Second, we see a denial of those societal realities that compel increasing numbers of Americans to use psychotropic drugs.”

The Drug Policy Alliance Network, which advocates for policy alternatives based on science, health and human-rights standards, is equally blunt in maintaining that “mandatory minimums have worsened racial and gender disparities, contributed greatly to prison overcrowding, and is both costly and unjust.”

Just how costly was underscored in a new study released this month by the Pew Center on the States, which reported that the Corrections industry last year accounted for the fastest expanding major segment of state budgets; over the past two decades, its growth as a share of state expenditures has been second only to Medicaid. According to the study, state corrections costs now exceed $50 billion annually and consume one of every 15 discretionary dollars.

Over the past three decades, states have been putting so many people behind bars that last year, one of every 100 adults in America was in prison or jail. But with far less notice, as the study reports, the number of people on probation or parole has also skyrocketed — to more than 5 million. As the authors note, “this means that 1 in every 45 adults in the United States is now under criminal supervision in the community, and combined with those in prison or jail, a stunning 1 in every 31 adults is under some form of correctional control. The rates are drastically elevated for men (1 in 18) and Blacks (1 in 11).”

Here again, Blacks bear a disproportionate burden: the Pew study (One in 31: The Long Reach of American Corrections), found that Black adultswere four times as likely as whites to be under correctional control; one in every 11 Black adults – 9.2 percent – was under correctional supervision at the end of 2007.

But the sheer cost of maintaining the world’s largest prison population and its ancillary correctional enterprises is beginning to take a toll on the states. Indeed, there is some evidence that the current economic downturn may yet prove to be the proverbial “ill wind” that blows some good for those who have long campaigned in favor of a more humane approach to dealing with low-level drug offenders – many of whom would be better served by treatment rather than incarceration. Nationwide, drug offenders account for 20 percent of all prison inmates (not counting those in jails).

Several states are already struggling with the oppressive costs of mass incarceration. In California, which maintains the country’s largest corrections system, federal judges ruled last month that conditions in the state’s 33 adult jails had become so overcrowded that they violate the constitutional rights of inmates, subjecting them to cruel and unusual punishment that is causing at least one death a month. To ensure minimal health and safety standards are met, the judges ruled that as many as one-third of the state’s inmates may have to be set free on early release or parole by 2012. There is just not enough money to build more prisons.

Moreover, as Guy Adams reported for the U.K. Independent, “the prison crisis is not limited to California. In Des Moines, Iowa, county officials plan to start charging prisoners for toilet paper. Michigan will release 4,000 prisoners who have served their minimum sentences. New Jersey and Vermont are putting drug-addicted offenders into treatment rather than prison. Louisiana, which has one of the highest incarceration rates in the developed world, is hoping to reform a system that spends more on prisons than on higher education.”

In a pithy editorial conclusion to its report, the Independent noted wryly that “these measures are controversial in a nation that views prison as a place for retribution rather than rehabilitation.”

The current economic crisis is forcing the United States to revisit that mindset. Maybe some small good may yet result from the ill wind of this recession, after all.

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Why Commerce Matters…. by Hugh Hamilton

When did the Department of Commerce become such a hotbed of political controversy? The withdrawal last week of Judd Gregg — a little-known Republican senator from New Hampshire nominated by President Barack Obama to head the Commerce Department — has focused considerable and unaccustomed public interest on the agency. (The president’s initial choice for the post – New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson – also withdrew last month amid some controversy). This is the type of excitement ordinarily reserved for portfolios like Treasury, State and Defense. But Commerce? Since when did Commerce matter this much?

Since it became responsible for administering the Census – that’s when.

It all goes back to the turn of the last century, when Congress authorized the establishment of a permanent census office. In 1903, the office was transferred from the Interior Department to the Department of Commerce and Labor. Ten years later, when Commerce and Labor were restructured as separate entities, the Census Bureau was retained at Commerce, where it has remained in a state of relative obscurity ever since. Yet, of all the myriad functions carried out by the Department of Commerce, none is so politically volatile nor more fundamental to our system of governance than the census. For starters, it is among the relatively few government functions explicitly mandated in the U.S. Constitution.

Article 1 Section 2 of the Constitution requires that a decennial census be conducted of everyone living in the United States. The numbers are used to determine reapportionment in the House of Representatives and redistricting for legislative seats at the state and local levels. In addition to the actual enumeration of persons conducted every 10 years, the census is also used to construct a demographic profile of the country, including such characteristics as race and ethnicity, age, education, employment, income and home ownership, to name just a few. The government then uses that information to determine the allocation of billions of dollars in federal funds to local communities; USA Today estimated those funds last year at some $300 billion.

With that much money and power at stake, the census has evolved to become the largest peacetime mobilization of personnel and resources in the United States, involving as many as 860,000 temporary workers the last time around and a projected cost of some $14 billion for 2010.

And it’s all administered by the Department of Commerce.

Original Undercount

Of course, the census has always courted controversy; the process of enumeration was contentious from the start. Among the early conundrums confronting the framers of the Constitution was this: if political power would be based on legislative representation, and legislative representation was to be determined by the process of enumeration, how should the population of enslaved Africans be measured in this equation? The framers agreed to settle their differences by adopting the infamous “three-fifths clause,” whereby enslaved blacks would be counted for this purpose as three-fifths of a person; Native Americans not subject to taxation were excluded altogether.

Consider this the original “undercount” — a problem that has dogged virtually every census since 1790. For while the three-fifths clause was repealed with ratification of the 14^th Amendment in 1868, the census has always struggled for any semblance of accuracy. In the census of 1870, for example, in which all inhabitants were counted as whole persons, Asian Americans were assigned their own racial classification for the first time. But they were collectively categorized as Chinese. The introduction of statistical sampling techniques and computerized tabulations in the 20^th century were also accompanied by new challenges and controversies over the accuracy of the count.

By 2000, the cost of the undercount was being measured in billions of dollars worth of federal aid to mainly poor and working-class urban communities of color. Pricewaterhousecoopers, in a report commissioned by the Presidential Members of the U.S. Census Monitoring Board, estimated in 2001 that the bulk of those losses would be felt in 58 of the nation’s largest counties, including Los Angeles, Brooklyn and the Bronx. Gilbert Casellas, Presidential Co-chair of the Monitoring Board, described the findings as “the most compelling evidence of the potential harm caused by the 2000 census undercount [which] will cost state and local governments billions of dollars in funds that are earmarked for the programs that largely serve our nation’s most disadvantaged.”

In the almost decade since then, additional challenges have emerged. The population today is larger and more diverse than at any time in our nation’s history. There are fears that in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, many Arab and Muslim Americans may be reluctant to participate because they have grown distrustful of the federal government. So, too, have many immigrant communities who feel they have been unfairly targeted and stigmatized.

These anxieties are not altogether misplaced. Indeed, some Republican lawmakers, like Candice Miller of Michigan, are reviving old arguments that seek to exclude non-citizens altogether from the census, on the ground that their presence alone caused nine seats in the House to change hands between the states in 2000. Supporters of this restrictive or exclusionary view argue that California gained six seats it would not have had otherwise, while Texas, New York, and Florida each gained one seat. Meanwhile, Indiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin each lost a seat and Montana, Kentucky, and Utah each failed to receive a seat they would otherwise have gained.

Needless to say, if this nativist view were to prevail, millions of lawful permanent residents and other non-citizens who work hard and pay taxes would be left with no political representation at all, as their numbers would not be counted in the reapportionment or redistricting process. That sounds like a classic case of “taxation without representation” to me.

An Independent Census?

That the census has been a political football from its inception is clear. But might it function more efficiently if it were elevated to an independent agency unfettered by the constraints of electoral politics? It’s an attractive proposition.

Last September, New York Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney introduced legislation that would remove the Census Bureau from the Commerce Department and establish it as an independent agency — much like NASA. She plans to reintroduce the bill before the current Congress, with the idea of having the newly independent entity take effect in 2012 – after the next census. Her effort has been endorsed by every living former Director of the Census, who collectively served seven presidents from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush. As Maloney explained:

“After three decades of controversy surrounding the decennial census, the time has come to recognize the Census Bureau as one of our country’s premier scientific agencies and it should be accorded the status of peers such as NASA, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

Nearly every economic statistic reported in the news and relied upon by Americans is derived from data collected day in and day out by career professionals at the Census Bureau. Yet the average American would be hard pressed to find this vital agency even on the Commerce Department’s own organizational chart on the government’s website, where it is buried in the basement of 32 boxes on the chart.”

She’s right. I tried. See for yourself.

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The Measure of America….by Hugh Hamilton

We are awash in a sea of economic data. Mostly these days, the reports range from the alarming to the impenetrable, but the message remains the same: hard times are here and even tougher times are in the offing. This weekend, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fell at an annual rate of 3.8 percent in the closing months of 2008; if you exclude the value of unsold inventory in the fourth quarter, the decline actually exceeded 5 percent. Last week alone saw announcements of more than 70,000 layoffs in sectors from trucks to technology.

Add to that the number of new people filing for unemployment benefits last week (588,000), which now brings to 4.78 million the number of those who have filed continuous claims for at least a month. Not only is that figure the highest on record, but it does not include the population of “under-employed” Americans, nor does it reflect those who have been without jobs for so long that they are no longer counted. Increasingly, the consequences of this economic quagmire are being measured in the trillions of dollars.

But beyond this minefield of macro-economic data lies another measure of America. It asks not only whether things are getting better or worse, but for whom. It utilizes an approach known as the human development model to measure the everyday experiences of ordinary people and their quality of life. Based on the Human Development Index first applied as a measure of living standards in the Global South some two decades ago, the American Human Development Index looks beyond such conventional indicators as gross domestic product and the consumer price index to emphasize three core areas of wellbeing:: life expectancy, level of educational attainment, and median income. The 2008-2009 American Human Development Report, published by the non-profit American Human Development Project, ranks all 50 states and 436 congressional districts according to these three criteria. What the report reveals is a tapestry of uneven development and opportunity within the United States and a less than favorable comparison to other developed nations in several key areas. For example, the authors note:

“The United States is a country of unparalleled opportunity and personal freedom. Yet, despite great progress and the unmatched resources at our disposal, United States is still beset by challenges that undermine the capacity of many Americans to realize their full potential. The United States ranks second in the world inper-capita income (behind Luxembourg), but 34^th in survival of infants to age one….We rank 42^nd in global life expectancy, and first among the world’s twenty-five richest countries in the percentage of children living in poverty.

“Comparisons among different groups of Americans reveal much about who is being left out of improvements in health, education and living standards: African American babies are two-and-a-half times more likely to die before age one than white babies; Latinos are twice as likely to drop out of high school as African Americans and almost four times more likely to drop out than whites. The earnings of African American women are about two-thirds of men’s earnings.”

Then last week, the American Human Development Project released its first-ever report at the state level, with data broken down by county, race and gender. Titled, “A Portrait of Mississippi: Mississippi Human Development Report 2009,” the report looked deeper into the conditions of human development inside the state that ranked dead last among all 50 U.S. states in the national report. Here again, what they found were significant variations in health, education and income among the subgroups within the state. In fact, researchers found that although Mississippi as a whole ranked last nationwide, some groups in the state enjoy levels of economic well-being similar to those in top-ranked Connecticut, while others experience levels of human development comparable to that of the average American nearly half a century ago. For example:

* Whites who are worst-off in the entire state in terms of income are still better off than the vast majority of African Americans.

* An African American baby boy born today in Mississippi can expect a shorter lifespan than the average American in 1960

* African American babies die in Mississippi at more than twice the rate of white babies

* About a third of Mississippi’s African American men over 25 do not have a high-school diploma; the state is spending twice as much per prisoner as it is on education per school child

So what do we do with these new data? Clearly, the human development index cannot take the place of conventional economic indicators as an overall measure of the nation’s economic wellbeing. Is there some practical value to be derived from adding this new measure to the mix? I put the question to Kristen Lewis, co-director of the American Human Development Project, on Talkback! Here’s part of her response:

“The reality is that a composite index like this has strengths and weaknesses. The strength of a composite index is that if you take just a few variables that everyone agrees are important, and that are easy to understand and explain, it’s a good way to start a conversation. It’s a powerful advocacy tool for raising awareness. But the weakness of any kind of composite index like this is that it is, of course, an oversimplification. There is much more to life than health, education and income. These are necessary — though not sufficient — characteristics, for leading a life of choice and value and personal freedom. It does leave out whole domains like politics and a range of psychological factors that are tremendously important. But these are the things that people are talking about around their kitchen table. And as a measure, it’s better than nothing … it’s certainly better than GDP.”

These reports should be required reading for all our nation’s leaders as they go about the business of crafting an economic recovery and reinvestment effort in the period ahead.

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CHANGING THE MINDSET ON FOREIGN AID… by Hugh Hamilton

As a candidate for the presidency, then-Senator Barack Obama told Americans repeatedly that he was running not only to end the war in Iraq, but to change the mindset that had taken the nation into war in the first place. As president, he must now direct his State Department to adopt a similar policy in addressing the challenge of development in the Global South. Washington must now “change the mindset” that for too long has misused the nation’s foreign-aid programs as a form of corporate welfare for U.S. business interests while doing little to improve the well being of the world’s poor.

Take, for example, the recent proposal by World Bank President Robert Zoellick, calling on Obama to lead the way in calling for the world’s richest nations to pledge 0.7 percent of their respective economic stimulus packages to establish a “vulnerability fund for assisting developing countries that can’t afford bailouts and deficits.” For the United States, that would amount to roughly $6 billion of the proposed $825 billion stimulus package.

Writing in The New York Times, Zoellick correctly noted that the global economic crisis has already pushed an estimated 100 million people back into poverty, and slumping exports have helped imperil the jobs of workers around the world. Moreover, other world leaders – including the leaders of Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Australia and Russia — have already signaled their interest in some variation of the idea.

Reasonable people might well disagree on whether or why we need to establish yet another “fund” for this purpose, rather than utilize any of the already existing and under-funded mechanisms in the international development bureaucracy to get the job done. But setting that aside for the moment, the single line in Zoellick’s piece that grabbed my attention was this:

“There is an additional incentive for America to help: building projects abroad are likely to increase demand for American-made equipment.” [Emphasis mine].

This is precisely the mindset that has given our country a bad name abroad. There is nothing wrong with expanding opportunities for American industry in other parts of the world, but don’t call it “foreign aid.” In fact, advocates for the poor have a special name for this duplicitous practice: they call it “Phantom Aid.”

As the Institute for Policy Studies pointed out in a report last November, Skewed Priorities: How the Bailouts Dwarf Other Global Crisis Spending:

“Many advocates for the poor have justifiably criticized current aid policies. Action Aid, for example, reports that some 86 percent of U.S. foreign assistance is so ineffective in fighting poverty that they call it ‘phantom aid.’ This international development group charges that much of U.S. aid supports geo-strategic interests rather than poverty reduction.”

The IPS report continues:

“The U.S. government also continues to tie some aid to purchases of U.S. goods and services, which benefits U.S. corporations but lengthens delivery time and raises costs…Thus, the focus should not solely be on increasing the dollar amount of aid flows, but on increasing the quality of aid.”

And there’s more.

In a comprehensive study of how global aid money gets diverted from the people it is supposed to benefit in the developing world, Action Aid reported that one quarter of all aid — $20 billion a year – from developed countries is actually spent on “expensive and often ineffective western consultants, research and training.” This so-called “technical assistance” to developing countries “too often promotes donor interests and inappropriate northern solutions instead of the alleviation of poverty.” The typical cost of an expatriate consultant could amount to some $200,000, with more than a third of that spent on school fees and child allowances for the expatriate’s family.According to the report, in Cambodia, foreign consultants were earning as much as $17,000 a month while government workers were paid $40; in Ghana, even relatively inexperienced foreign consultants were being paid in one day what government officials earned in a month.

The absurdity of the situation was further underscored last year amid the global food crisis that triggered riots and protests from Haiti to Indonesia. Thanks to a system built on putting profits before people, multinational companies like Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Bunge and Monsanto were making money hand-over-fist while the hungry were reduced to fighting over scraps in some of the poorest corners of the world. As John Nichols reported in The Nation:

“The current global food system, which was designed by U.S.-based agribusiness conglomerates like Cargill, Monsanto and ADM and forced into place by the U.S. government and its allies at the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, has planted the seeds of disaster by pressuring farmers to produce cash crops for export and alternative fuels rather than grow healthy food for local consumption and regional stability.”

By imposing these self-destructive policies on the world’s poor as a condition for their receiving our foreign aid, we make the world secure for corporate capital at the expense of our international credibility.

Anuradha Mittal, executive director of the Oakland Institute and one of the leading experts in the field, explains:

“Over the last few decades, liberalization of agriculture, dismantling of state-run institutions like marketing boards, and specialization of developing countries in exportable cash crops such as coffee, cocoa, cotton, and even flowers, encouraged by international financial institutions backed by rich countries like the U.S., has driven the poorest countries into a downward spiral, directly threatening their food security and economic sustainability.

“Removal of tariff barriers has allowed a handful of Northern countries to capture Third World markets by dumping heavily subsidized commodities while undermining local food production. This has resulted in developing countries turning from net exporters to large importers of food.”

In fact, according to Mittal, developing countries have seen their food trade transformed from a surplus of US$1 billion in the 1970s, into an US$11 billion deficit by 2001.

In his inaugural address, President Obama spoke directly to the people of poor nations, promising that the United States will work alongside them to “make [their] farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds.” Now he needs to tell his State Department that we will no longer use our foreign-aid programs as a vehicle for infiltrating and undermining the economic and political sovereignty of the developing world. Foggy Bottom should cease to function as a shill for corporate interests abroad and instead live up to our promises to the poor.

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BEWARE THE COMING SURGE … by Hugh Hamilton

Expect a surge of “post-racial” rationalization to infiltrate the public discourse once Barack Obama is officially ensconced at the Oval Office.

With a black man in the White House, the argument goes, what more compelling evidence can there be that America has finally overcome its long and sordid history of racism? Surely, we can now put the past behind us? Did not the new president himself assure us that change has come to America?

Yes, he certainly did. But change does not on its own erase the consequences of history. Nor does it constitute in itself a remedy for transgressions past or neutralize the legacy of  longstanding injustice. As Obama himself acknowledged at Philadelphia last March:

“In the words of William Faulkner, ‘the past is not dead and buried; in fact, it is not even past.’

“Segregated schools were, and are inferior schools, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.

“Legalized discrimination – where blacks were prevented, often through violence,  from owning property, or loans not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth or bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persist in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.”

The enduring consequences of that history are captured most recently in the 6^th annual “State of the Dream” report from the progressive think-tank United for a Fair Economy. Titled “The Silent Depression” and released this week to coincide with the 80^th birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the report calls attention to the disproportionate suffering of blacks and other communities of color amid a deepening national recession.

“Many Americans today are already experiencing a silent economic depression that, in terms of unemployment, equals or exceeds the Great Depression of 1929,” the report warns. Among the alarming indicators of enduring economic disparity:

• 24 percent of blacks and 21 percent of Latinos live in poverty today, compared to a 10 percent poverty rate   among whites
• Almost 12 percent of blacks are unemployed; among young black males aged  16-19, the unemployment rate is 32.8 percent, while their white counterparts are at 18.3 percent.
• Nearly 30 percent of blacks have zero or negative worth, versus 15 percent of whites
• On average, people of color have 8 cents for every dollar of white wealth.

In any other population, the report says, this rate of unemployment would generate disturbing news headlines about an economic depression. Not so in the black community. Nor has there been talk of any bailout package to remedy this opprobrious state of affairs. The authors note that massive government investment in communities and individuals following the Great Depression directly fostered the growth of the largest middle class in American history. But blacks were, for the most part, excluded from participating in those programs and benefiting from those policies due to the institutional racism of the day.

(The resulting state of endemic economic privation that persists to this day in communities of color has been described elsewhere by sociologist Algernon Austin as black America’s permanent recession).

This year’s “State of the Dream” report offers a timely prescription for change to the incoming Obama administration:

“More work challenging exploitation and fostering middle-class prosperity needs   to be done. In this new millennium, we need to add the elimination of institutional racism to the list. The same asset investment and policy change that supported the development of a largely white post-World War II middle class must be used to eliminate the economic depression currently affecting communities of color.”.

There’s nothing “post-racial” about the challenge ahead if we really want to usher in the kind of change we need.

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